THE TAYLOR RANCH WAR

About the Book

This book is an example of the past colliding with the present as an ultra liberal Colorado Supreme Court chief justice reached back 500 years to Spain’s land grants and shared (communal) use of property and tried to mix them with the American concept of private property rights. She ruled in several opinions that, under a 160-year-old Mexican land grant (similar to colonial Spanish grants) and a 150-year-old ambiguous document, an initially undefined number of Costilla County, Colorado, residents would have free “reasonable” use of the 77,500-acre, privately owned, Taylor Ranch, mainly for livestock grazing and timber. A bare majority of the court’s justices agreed with her.

When the rulings were gradually implemented with a vengeance by a district judge, some 1,200 residents were granted virtually uncontrolled and unlimited use of the Ranch. The Ranch owners not only lost $23 million in market value of the property but were also ordered to pay at least $300,000 in court costs. The rulings were called “stunning” and “unprecedented.” As 2006 approached, the residents were assessing the perhaps marginal economic benefits of the access and wondering whether voluntary compliance with a locally-drafted land use plan would save The Mountain’s fragile environment.

For over 100 years, the mostly Hispanic population of the Culebra River basin adjacent to the Colorado-New Mexico border lived a very isolated Shangri La existence based on subsistence farming and hunting and fishing in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In 1960, Jack Taylor, a tough timberman from North Carolina, purchased one of the last two major pieces of a one-million-acre Mexican land grant covering the mountains and told the local residents to stop trespassing on it. In 45 years of litigation over rights on the property, Taylor won victories in Federal courts but they were overturned in the State courts, and Jack Taylor’s successors were hit hard.

In reaction to Jack Taylor’s arrogant attitude, a 15-year range war with beatings and shootings erupted. After he was almost assassinated, his son, Zachary, took over Ranch management of the property and inherited the continuous and costly litigation. When he launched a major logging operation in the 1990s to get money to pay lawyers, a violent ecological war erupted with residents and environmentalists attacking log-loaded trucks.

Throughout the decades, the press and many State government officials sympathized with the low income Hispanic residents in their fight against “greedy gringos” and other wealthy “outsiders” who bought and sold the Ranch. With two or three exceptions in 45 years, stories in the press including those about the Colorado Supreme Court rulings did not discuss the private property rights of the Ranch owners.

This book is an attempt to tell both sides of the controversy and measure the stakes in Colorado’s longest-running litigation on one topic.

About the Author

Dick Johnston grew up in the Escalante Desert, southwestern Utah, the son of a sheep rancher His high school was Wasatch Academy, a Presbyterian boarding school in central Utah. After overseas service in the Navy, he received a BA degree in journalism from the University of Colorado and an MA in political science from the University of Illinois. He was a newspaper reporter/editor for 20 years including 10 years at The Denver Post followed by 20 years as a public relations counselor for government agencies in the Denver region. When he retired, he began 10 years of work on this book. Dick and his wife, Loretta, live in Westminster, CO.